A novel about a grieving couple in a dying coastal town. Up all night, Marlene drives the highways and back roads near her home in hopes that some landmark will spark an image of her daughter, one untainted by years of grief. Her husband Les steams out to sea in his effort to cope. He is a commercial fisherman on a boat staffed up with desperate loners and shape-shifting friends obliterating their bodies in two-week shifts of crushing labor. The couple keep their pain hidden from each other, and most of their lives separate.
Magariel's prose is as quietly lovely and evocative as his subjects are bleak...His settings showcase realistic detail, and both beauty and damage: fecund coastlines and wetlands, the harsh sea, an old family home, and garishly decorated working-class bars ... Stark and tragic, Walk the Darkness Down offers a harrowing view of individual and familial suffering--with empathy and, ultimately, with hope.
A notable strength of the work is the engaging backdrop it provides of maritime culture in a declining town. There are consistently sharp and memorable descriptions of land and sea and of the ecological disruptions which form a counterpart to the human world...The author clearly knows this world well; the daily lives of those in the fishing trade, at work and at home, are rendered with a strong sense of authenticity ... Less successful are the rather stale scenes and occasionally implausible dialogue charting the psychological mechanics of Les and Marlene’s failing relationship or Marlene’s interactions with Josie, her ersatz daughter, and the pimp who eventually reclaims the girl. The novel is written in a style that oscillates, a little awkwardly, between brisk realism and a sometimes-strained poeticism ... Nevertheless, beyond these distractions, the vision of a coastal region and its cultural milieu offered here is often poignant. A bracing story of grieving, coping, and reaching for the terms of recovery.
Magariel effectively portrays Neverland as a wild place populated by lost souls, stripped in his words of 'the illusion that the world has been conquered, charted, angled for human need.' Downbeat and atmospheric, this psychological drama gets the job done.
